Читать книгу Clever Dog: Understand What Your Dog is Telling You - Sarah Whitehead - Страница 14

All too often, dogs showing aggression are labelled as dominant. Their owners are told they have no control because their dogs lack respect for them, and that they must re-establish their leadership in all manner of ways that domestic dogs are meant to understand.

When I see a dog that is showing aggression, however, I take a different route. I look for the underlying emotional state – and this, in the vast majority of cases, starts out as fear. Fearful dogs would always rather avoid confrontation. They don’t want to take risks or escalate the threat they are experiencing. It’s dangerous. Avoidance is not possible in many situations – we block dogs’ opportunities for flight by having them on the lead, in a kennel, or tied up – and this means they are effectively forced to take defensive action.

Once this has happened and the behaviour has been reinforced, or rewarded, by relief and success, then of course it is going to happen again and again. Unfortunately, for some dogs this new strategy is enough to alter their emotional state from one of fear to one of satisfaction. Now we have a dog that knows how to use aggression and enjoys it. That’s a whole different can of worms. The dog that had no way of coping has developed a strategy that works for him. Sadly, it is one that rarely works for us and in the worst-case scenarios the dog can no longer be kept as a family pet.

With this in mind, our mission should surely be to focus on prevention, rather than struggling for a cure. Puppies come into this world with a whole set of genetic potentials, and some of those will be connected to just how well they cope under pressure. While we would like our dogs to live a wonderful, stress-free life, the reality is that this can’t always be the case. Every day, I have to get out of bed too early, get ready in no time, go in the office, deal with e-mails, phone calls, traffic and technology, fix the printer, tussle with the mail, work my way through a hundred little annoyances – and that’s all on a good day! Dogs also have to deal with life as it happens, warts and all – and how they learn to do this, how they learn to build effective coping strategies, is largely up to us.